Troubling Images

Evaluating The Chicago School, 20 Years Later

Twenty years ago, I started to hear about the kind of art that eventually became known as Imagism.

Those were the early days, when it seemed as if everybody was talking about it. Something important was happening in Chicago. Or so it was said.

That it never stopped being said-with an insistence unnecessary in the case of fact-is what occasions these thoughts. For today, the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Renaissance Society, Smart Gallery and Terra Museum of American Art all are giving attention to Imagism in a way that cannot help but make old reactions vivid by bringing back the past.

In 1967, I was a college student who read about more exhibitions than I attended, so my first acquaintance with Imagist art was made through what was written on it, which led to a certain conditioning.

The tone of the writing back then was relentlessly upbeat, as its purpose was to cheerlead. Of course, the words only mirrored desires of the community. And, though I did not think of it, such desires resulted from a long and unpleasant feeling that whatever else Chicago was, in art it was behind New York.

I failed to think of it because of naivete. I also overlooked how the championing of a movement could bring personal gain. In those days, I believed the practicalities of being a critic or an art collector-or both at once-would be outweighed by a principle that took one beyond the self.

Poet and critic Matthew Arnold gave me the principle when he wrote about

``a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.`` This was Arnold`s definition of criticism, and from the first time I read it, in 1966, it sounded right.

So I was more than a little stunned by the writing on Imagism, which every week set before us a new master, brilliant, unconventional and home grown. We were told that Chicago artists were the equal of artists anywhere;

as time went on, the list of comparisons also ranged throughout history, from Persian miniaturists to Pablo Picasso.

When I came to look at the work, then, I reacted as much to the writing as to whatever the artists had created and was profoundly let down by the paintings in comparison with the prose. All that was claimed on their behalf failed to register truthfully with me. In fact, I had to disregard what had been said and begin again.

My initial feelings about Imagism were expressed in strong terms, disappointment mixing with irritation. But as time went on and I became accustomed to the work-which itself began to show changes in emphasis-I reached a more resigned viewpoint. Sometimes I wished that I could like Imagism; without question, it would have made my life easier. Yet that did not happen. Fourteen years after my first Imagist review, I still do not share the popular opinion.

What I found, so long ago, was that the Imagists were not much concerned about defining or redefining the ``Chicagoness`` of Chicago art. Some of those who are best known-Roger Brown, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg-were neither born nor reared here. And unless enrollment in the School of the Art Institute was taken as the Chicago experience, Imagist artists did not reflect an essential sense of the city.

In 1972, critic Harold Rosenberg wrote as much, claiming that not one work in the Museum of Contemporary Art`s Imagist exhibition ``had any reference to the visual realities of its point of origin.`` But as I did not come to know that essay until some years later (when it was reprinted in ``Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations``) I felt an absence of place for another reason: I had grown up in the kind of neighborhood the Imagists professed to love.

In that environment, day-to-day existence proceeded more desperately and with deeper feeling than anything the Imagists depicted. Unlike some Chicago artists of earlier generations, they were not interested in getting at the life of a community. They only collected its tribal objects, souvenirs of the thrift shop, tattoo parlor and neighborhood eccentric. They collected them as the Cubists collected African art, with little regard for original function or meaning. Little wonder that a wide range of experience would be out of the picture. When not exalting kitsch, the Imagists merely described superficial appearance, as if quality of existence could be read from skin condition or the grotesqueries of comic books.

I think now of an exhibition catalogue called ``Who Chicago?``-its title a glancing reference to the Hairy Who, one of the most celebrated Imagist groups. Each artist in the exhibition is shown in a photographic portrait, Ed Paschke posing in leather jacket and shades like one of his street dudes, Nutt in British cap and voluminous pleated pants on a golf course. These self-images are curious. Despite their differences, each is a portrait of the artist as a dandy.